This is a simple console tool for dumping message history from a Telegram chat into a jsonl, csv or plain text file.
From PyPI:
pip install telegram-messages-dump
From sources: Fetch the latest sources with git:
git clone https://github.com/Kosat/telegram-messages-dump.git
Then run directly from sources
cd telegram-messages-dump
python -m telegram_messages_dump
Or run after installing locally
python setup.py install
telegram-messages-dump
Binaries:
Binaries for Linux, Windows and MacOS are available in Releases section.
Mandatory parameters are <chat_name> e.g. @Python, @CSharp or a title of a dialogue, as seen in the UI, and <phone_num> - a telephone number. A phone number is needed for authentication and will not be stored anywhere. After the first successful authorization it will create telegram_chat_dump.session file containing auth token. The information from this file is being reused in next runs. If this is not a desirable behaviour, use -cl flag to delete session file on exit.
Note1: You can use telegram dialogue multi-word title like so:
--chat="Telegram Geeks"
with double quotes. However, when using multi-word title (rather than @channel_name), you need to join the channel first. Only then you will be able to dump it. This way you can dump private dialogues which doesn't have @channel_name.
Note2: For private channels you can also pass an invitation link as chat name. E.g.
--chat="https://t.me/joinchat/XXXXXYYYYZZZZZ"
. IMPORTANT: It only works when you (the logged-in user) has already joined the private chat that the invitation link corresponds to.
telegram-messages-dump -c <chat_name> -p <phone_num> [-l <count>] [-o <file>] [-cl]
Where:
-c, --chat Unique name of a channel/chat. E.g. @python.
-p, --phone Phone number. E.g. +380503211234.
-o, --out Output file name or full path. (Default: telegram_<chatName>.log)
-e, --exp Exporter name. text | jsonl | csv (Default: 'text')
, --continue Continue previous dump. Supports optional integer param <message_id>.
-l, --limit Number of the latest messages to dump, 0 means no limit. (Default: 100)
-cl, --clean Clean session sensitive data (e.g. auth token) on exit. (Default: False)
-v, --verbose Verbose mode. (Default: False)
, --addbom Add BOM to the beginning of the output file. (Default: False)
-h, --help Show this help message and exit.
After dumping messages into an output file, telegram-messages-dump
also creates a meta file
with the latest (biggest) message id that was successfully saved into an output file.
For instance, if messages with ids 10..100 were saved in output file, the metafile will contain the "latest_message_id": 100
record in it.
- If you want to update an existing dump file use
--continue
option without a parameter value. In this casetelegram-messages-dump
will read the latest message id from a meta file. In the sample below it will beC:\temp\xyz.txt.meta
:In this casetelegram-messages-dump -p... -oC:\temp\xyz.txt --continue
telegram-messages-dump
will look forC:\temp\xyz.txt.meta
file and try to incrimentally update the contents ofC:\temp\xyz.txt
with new messages.
Note: In incremental mode when metafile exists
--exp
and--chat
will be taken from the meta file and must NOT be specified explicitely as parameters.--limit
setting has to be omitted.
- Otherwise, if you DON'T have a metafile or want to ignore it, you can still open your dump file and find the last message's id at the bottom of the file and then specify it explicitly as
--continue=<LAST_MSG_ID>
command, along with the correct--exp
and--chat
that were used to generate the existing dump file.telegram-messages-dump -p... -oC:\temp\xyz.txt --continue=100500 --exp=jsonl --chat=@geekschat
In both aforementioned cases, telegram-messages-dump
will open the existing C:\temp\xyz.txt
file and append the newer messages that were posted in the telegram chat since the message with the message with id 100500 was created.
Note1: There must be
=
sign between the--continue
command name and integer message id.
Note2: In incremental mode without metafile,
--out
,--exp
and--chat
must be specified explicitely as parameters.--limit
setting has to be omitted.
- This tool relies on Telethon - a Telegram client implementation in Python.
Output format is managed by exporter plugins. Currently there are two exporters available: text, jsonl and csv.
Exporters reside in ./exporters
subfolder.
Basically an exporter is a class that implements three methods:
format(...)
that extracts all necessary data from a message and stringifies it.begin_final_file(...)
that allows an exporter to write a preamble to a resulting output file.
To use a custom exporter. Place you .py
file with a class implementing those 3 methods into ./exporters
subfolder and specify its name in --exp <exporter_name>
setting.
Note1: the class name MUST exactly match the file name of its
.py
file. This very same name is used as an argument for the--exp
setting.
Note2: in
.vscode
subfolder you can find the default settings that I use for debugging this project.
This project is licensed under the MIT license.